


far from any road

by lostballoons



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Southern Gothic, Animal Abuse, Animal Death, Horror, Isolation, M/M, Minor Character Death, everyone is really sweaty
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-28
Updated: 2016-06-23
Packaged: 2018-07-10 17:04:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,797
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6996967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lostballoons/pseuds/lostballoons
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I. <em>They’ll whisper it between breaths, as if this secret is their own and this cell is not a prison.</em><br/>II. <em>He runs his fingers through his hair (a soft dark anomaly in their land of marigolds and dust).</em><br/>III. <em>A knock at door. Harder, more forceful.</em></p><p> </p><p>  <em>"You keep bouncing your knee. Do you want to run?"</em></p><p> </p><p>strangers show up at hux's door. reluctantly, he lets them in.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. marigolds & dust

I. Ren

Ren escapes from prison in the early morning. He creeps through the corridors to the creak of just-waking crickets. He creeps across the workyard, its grass still pale and not yet sunburnt. His heart pounds in his throat. At lunch they’ll tell stories about him. About that fierce-eyed committer of patricide, that dark rolling storm gliding through cellblock D. They’ll whisper that he swore to his cellmate that he once caught his shadow moving on its own. They’ll whisper it between breaths, as if this secret is their own and this cell is not a prison.

A flashlight spots across Ren’s back. A guard shouts. Ren breaks into a sprint, slides down the hill, over the gravel path to the outhouses. He’s not far from the tracks now. He catches glimpses of them over the yellow country (yellow grass, hot yellow stench of sulfur burning his nostrils, yellow-eyed kings with wires in their teeth and fences carving out their homesteads). The train rattles the ground. The fence is in sight, a tight-lipped goodbye rising over the horizon. A dog barks. Another guard shouts. He run-slips over the grass, tries to vault the fence but slashes his thighs and lip on the barbed wire. _Oh god oh god oh god, it hurts it fucking_ hurts-- His face twists and his hands shake. 

He does not cry out.

He leaps into a moving train car, shielding his face with his forearm. Shoulders shuddering nearly convulsing (his blood stains the floor and his lips), his eyes dart between the sacks of grain crowding the floor and the cobwebs scrawling across the ceiling. He presses his hands to his thighs. A plan, he needs a plan. With some sincerity he could engineer a bare-faced redemption, perhaps as a senator or a cowboy of yesterday. He tries to picture himself in furs and fringe, but he can only imagine the inside of his father’s ancient pickup, the bobbleheaded hula girl nodding herself to sleep on his dashboard and those boxes of contraband cigars, spilling like loose lips from the backseat onto the floor. 

The train screeches to a stop. Dogs howl. Groaning, Ren struggles to stand. His blood streaks the floor. All cracked and dry it paints his mouth a ghastly red. Legs quaking shaking at a yesterday thought he pales: _I’ll kill them before they drag me back_. 

He swallows his shame and jumps from the car, rolling and wincing against the gravel. Stumbling, he flees into the willow trees. He is pursued, but only briefly.

II. Hux

Hux deals in brutal honesty. “We all die in the end,” he says, laying out the contents of his briefcase. He sits back straight on the old couple’s sinkhole couch. They huddle across from him. Her knees knock like rattlesnakes on the rocking chair; his hands grip tight to his bible. White-faced, he says he’s incubating a tumor, says he’s pregnant with his own disease. Got six kids--all useless, no doctors. Says he’s not ready to kick it so soon, hopes they’ll find a cure before the next Kentucky Derby. Hux lights a cigarette while he waits for him to finish. “Well,” he says, “some of us have to die sooner than others.”

He takes a long drag. “You wouldn’t want to leave your family uninsured, would you?” 

III. The House, Exterior

A countryside house, recently painted a touch-up yellow. The sun has bleached the porch’s hardwood soft white. The lawn is trim. The willow trees hang like lovers over its sinking roof (a project for next month). A dirt path winds its way from the road, past the mailbox and the wood fence, to the house’s front. It narrows at the house’s side, then winds behind, past the stable and into the wood. 

Hux sits cross-legged at the house’s kitchen table. He sips at his mid-afternoon coffee, leafs through the newspaper without reading it. He has unbuttoned the top of his shirt. The cat lays stretched across the tile. He decides that today he’ll re-organize the file cabinet. First alphabetically, then by relevance. Then he’ll phone the Robinsons. He’ll remind them that their grandfather’s terminal illness has become rather, well, terminal, and that he advises upgrading their plan—they’ll only pay a marginally larger premium, Hux will promise, lying through his teeth. Then he’ll busy himself with dinner, then begrudgingly the animals, and then, as the moon calls the owls to breakfast, he’ll strip to his bedclothes and try not to find comfort in his bedsheets.

He sighs, folds his newspaper shut and creases it at its edges. He leans back in his chair, crossing his arms over his chest. He glances out the window. His eyes widen.

Hux rushes for the cabinet above the stove. His hands scramble for his gun. Steel-eyed, he yanks up the kitchen window’s screen. He fires a warning shot in the dirt. It sprays on the front steps. “Don’t come any closer,” he snarls. His grip on the gun is rusty. His voice nearly falters. “Or I’ll shoot.”

The thing in the lawn pauses. It leans against the mailbox. Its hand smears a bloody print on the white wood. An accident or a threat, Hux decides. A great hulking shadow, it shudders, then stumbles forward. 

Hux fires another warning shot. “I’ll shoot to kill next time,” he hisses. 

“I’m hurt,” the thing croaks. A man’s voice, too light for his broad shoulders, his bruised knuckles.

“You’re bleeding on my mailbox.” 

“I’ll clean it tomorrow.”

Hux raises an eyebrow. He nearly laughs. “Tomorrow?”

The man staggers across the dirt. Blood crusts his thighs. Hux notes his split lip, his sunburnt cheeks, barbed wire tangles across his legs. “Are you gonna shoot me or what?” he asks. He scowls at Hux. “The suspense is killing me.”

“I’m assessing the situation,” snaps Hux. His finger slacks on the trigger. “Do you intend to kill me?”

“Are you always this rude to people you’ve just met?”

“Usually, yes.” The afternoon sun flushes Hux’s cheeks. “I’ll ask you one more time.”

“You’re going to help me,” says the stranger roughly. His dark eyes meet Hux’s. Fierce and unrelenting and utterly terrified, he only blinks when Hux breaks his gaze. Said too quickly, frightened and not on purpose: “I only hurt people who deserve it.” 

Hux doesn’t know him well enough to know this is a lie.

The stranger’s shoulders heave. 

He staggers toward the front steps. 

Hux closes the window screen. A thud, the soft sigh of fabric against wood--the stranger slumps against the front door. Hux tiptoes to the living room. He’s careful not to swish the curtains, not to creak the floorboards. He crouches behind the door. “Please,” the stranger whispers. He swallows too loud. His pride has lodged itself in his throat. “Please.”

Hux leans his cheek against the wood. His eyelids flutter shut. His heartbeat hunts for an end in simple murder, but curiosity’s cold breath shivers down his spine. “Tell me again,” he says, squishing a centipede under the barrel of his gun. “How you need my help.”

IV. Upstairs Bath

The slashes on the stranger’s face somehow amplify his boyishness. In the bathtub he sits, head bowed between his knees, a shadow bent over itself. Hux washes the dirt from his shoulders. The early evening dyes his hands pink. June bugs throw themselves against the window screen. The cat, perched in the windowsill, bats at them. The stranger smiles at her, asks her name. You’re oddly calm for someone who’s bleeding out, Hux replies, but the stranger scowls, reminds him that he’s not the point. It’s the goddamn cat he’s asking about. Millicent, Hux snaps, tugging the stranger’s head hard under the faucet. 

Hux asks questions with his fingertips. _You never told me your name_ , he accuses, scrubbing the stranger’s back a mottled red. _You never asked_ , reply his shoulders, too big and too hunched for the narrow bathroom walls, its sagging ceiling. 

The furrow in Hux’s brow asks, _What happened to you_? 

Sweat beads above his lip. No answers. A revision: _What are you running from_? 

Black tangles plaster themselves to the notches of the stranger’s neck. Hux counts three fat moles on his shoulders. Two sprout hairs, wiry misplaced eyelashes. He runs a washcloth over them, then down his bruised arms. Barbed wire welts score his inner thighs. Hux moves to clean them, then, thinking better of it, hands the rag to the stranger. 

The stranger appreciates this. 

He sits back, winces as he wipes the dirt from his wounds. Perhaps, Hux wonders, he thought he would be better than this. Hux watches him closely, points out any blood that isn’t washed down the drain.

The thud of bugs against the screen, the groan of willow trees against the wind. It’s beginning to get dark.

The stranger slaps the rag over the tub’s side. He glances at Hux. He swallows. _Is it possible_ , asks the slump in his shoulders, the quiet drumming of his heart, _to relearn simplicity_? _Even in the company of a stranger_?

Almost gently, Hux returns his head under the faucet. He runs his fingers through his hair (a soft dark anomaly in their land of marigolds and dust). _I’ll tell you tomorrow_ , they reply. 

V. Kitchen

The next morning, over a scant breakfast of eggs and burnt toast: 

The stranger wears one of Hux’s too-small undershirts. Hux’s hair is combed and gelled. He picks at his toast with a fork and knife. The stranger’s legs sprawl beneath the table. He leans his cheek on his fist. His legs throb; his lip threatens to split at any moment. He doesn’t pretend to have slept last night. The sun sweats through the windowsills. The cat lurks around the corner. 

This is harder than he thought it would be.

“So,” Hux says.

“So.”

“You haven’t killed me yet.” Hux sips his coffee. “I’m pleasantly surprised.”

The stranger shrugs. “Yeah, well.”

The kitchen tile is stained in the daylight. The stranger bets that Hux has spent hours on his knees here, praying to the cracks in ceiling for a cure for his domestic blight, some revolutionary cleaning product to save his floor from imperfection. He bets he washes all the dishes himself, too. He wouldn’t trust anyone else to get them so spotless, so impeccably clean. 

The stranger looks up. He realizes that Hux has been watching him. 

Hux stirs his coffee, then leans forward. He places both elbows on the table, straightens his cufflinks. He glances sideways at the stranger. “I have a deal for you,” he says.

“My mother said I was the worst deal she ever got,” says the stranger. He blushes at his own honesty. 

“That makes two of us.” Hux crosses his legs. “May I make my proposition, or should I wait for you to finish your sob story?”

Tight-lipped and white knuckled, the stranger nods. 

“Good.” Hux leans back in his chair. “Because you haven’t told me your name, I can assume that you are either someone utterly inconsequential or that you are someone whose name carries a certain air of _notoriety_. Judging by your injuries”—he stares pointedly at the stranger’s fault line fact—“you are the latter. Is this true?”

The stranger’s jaw tightens. 

“It’s a shame, what that barbed wire did to your face,” Hux lies. He likes the way it splits his youth in two. “You keep bouncing your knee. Do you want to run?”

“I’m tired of your questions,” growls the stranger. Hux smiles.

“Then I’ll continue with my proposition: a simple trade. Your honesty for my secrecy. Your labor for my livelihood. I have a stable full of animals that I hate to care for.” He reaches in his pocket and retrieves a half-empty packet of cigarettes. He lights one before continuing. “Something about you tells me that you don’t mind getting your hands dirty.”


	2. his father's hands

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Four hours until Hux returns._
> 
> _Ren swears he can wait._

I. Stable

 

The sun sweats itself over the house. It hangs low, panting like a restless dancer, beating itself against the yellow walls—exhausted, but relentless.

 

Bored and alone, Ren hides himself in the stable. In Hux’s absence—“I should charge you rent,” Hux had snarled when he’d asked him to skip work—he hunts for friendship with the animals.

 

He names them after people he mingled with in prison. A safe way to acknowledge the past, he thinks. It doesn’t dig too deep; it won’t split his scars. He names the cow Phasma. The bobble-headed rooster, Finn. The sheep, Mitaka. They clamber at his feet, squawking and crooning for his attention. He brushes the burs from their coats, scratches Mitaka’s feathered chin until he dozes off. As he cuts open a bag of grain, they stampede to his side.

 

Ren smiles. 

 

He likes that they need him.

 

He rests against the stable wall. Sweat plasters his shirt to his skin. Millicent perches in the rafters, eyes locked to the bird’s nest across the barn. Thin slats of light slip between the ceiling cracks. In the sun’s footsteps, dust flurries attempt winter. It smells like shit, like sweat, like rotten eggs forgotten and left un-gathered. 

 

His father would’ve liked this place. He would have pinned numbers to each creature’s head. “Bet we could fetch a mean price for the cow,” he would say, spitting tobacco from the corner of his mouth. Ben would have paled (and he did pale, Ren tries not to remember, oh he did pale). 

 

Ren’s knee begins to bounce. Wire aches shudder through his thighs.

 

A thought from the back of his head: _Not this, not now_. 

 

“You’ll help me drag her to the car,” his father would instruct him. Now he’d be sizing up the room, searching for a shovel to knock the cow out. Ben would mumble a protest. Mama’s gonna kill both of us, he’d say, so quiet only the chickens could hear. “What was that?” his father would ask. He was hard of hearing in one ear. He caught every other word, and then only the good ones.

 

“Nothing,” Ben would answer, scratching the mole on his shoulder. “It’s nothing.” 

 

Blood pounds in Ren’s ears. The chicken pecks at his foot. He kicks it away and forgets to wince as it cries out.

 

Together they’d haul the cow to the pickup’s bed. Ben would toss a tarp over her, and his father would knot the tarp to the truck. With the sun on their shoulders and mosquitos kissing their cheeks, they’d squeal a dust storm past Hux’s yellow house, past the mailbox and those willow trees, their branches groaning and lurching like river bottoms.

 

Ren slams his fist into the wall. Its old wood cracks and snaps beneath him. Splinters dig themselves in his knuckles. For a moment, the animals fall silent. 

 

Ren breathes heavy. His shoulders heave. It’s too hot out here, too hot in this scorched country. Knees quivering lip trembling, he stares at the great gape in the wall. Shame flushes his cheeks. The sheep noses at his leg. He could kill it, hang its skin like a veil from the rafters, he could—

 

He swallows. The cat leaps from the rafters. The animals resume themselves, squabbling over grain and splashing in the water trough. The sun buries itself in his hair. 

 

Numbly, Ren picks up the wall’s pieces. He presses them together again. He slicks glue between their splinters and hopes Hux doesn’t notice.

 

II. Living Room

 

Ren’s long legs spill out under the coffee table. He sits half-turned on the couch, examining the bookshelf. Medical journals, encyclopedias, histories of the world wars.

 

Hux doesn’t fool himself with fiction.

 

“I never learned your name,” Hux says. He sits on the armchair, carefully packing a pipe with tobacco.

 

“It’s Ren,” Ren replies. He swallows, hard. “Kylo Ren.”

 

“I’ve never met a Kylo before.”

 

“You don’t seem like you meet lots of people.”

 

“No.” Smoke curls from Hux’s lips. Ren can’t help but stare. “I suppose I don’t.”

 

Suddenly nervous, Ren drags his eyes to his knuckles. Perhaps Hux will offer to ice his bruises and stitch his thoughts back together, to wash away with no gentleness the knocking behind Ren’s eyes. Ren turns to face him. He rests his hands on his knees. Soft-eyed and staring, he waits.

 

Hux takes another drag. He watches the curves in the wallpaper (this home was once his grandmother’s; in moments of weakness he tries to remember her name), a dusty arrangement of blushing roses and cursing marigolds. Their petals peel as they climb toward the ceiling.

 

“How was work?” Ren asks.

 

“It was fine,” Hux replies. His gaze wanders over Ren’s hands, pausing in the valleys between his knuckles, narrowing at the splinters burrowed in his fingers. Ren’s eyes ask for his kindness and cruelty, a back scrubbed raw in the bathtub quiet. He wants Hux to ask him what’s wrong. He wants to not tell him.

 

Ren waits for an offer.

 

Hux leans over the coffee table, picks through his stack of newspapers. _Ask me for nothing_ , says the sharpness of his jaw, the click of his shoe against the hardwood.

 

Ren thinks about running.

 

But the woods are long.

 

And the woods are deep.

 

And so he stays.

 

III. The House, Interior

 

Each morning at eight, Hux dons his hat and straightens his tie in the living room mirror. He holds his briefcase tight at his side. He organizes his clients’ names first alphabetically, then by nearness to death. Then, with little deliberation, he leaves the house. He doesn’t say goodbye.

 

Hux will return at five. He always returns at five.

 

In these hours, Ren walks the machinations of the house. He starts in the guest room—his room, he reminds himself. He picks through the closet first. An old woman’s wardrobe, packed tight with asphalt skirts and high-collared shirts. Today, Monday, they smell like river sand, like a naturalist’s hands.

 

Ren pulls open the dresser drawers. He discovers only a spider. He pulls the curtains from the windows. Here he can see clearly the forest, how its weeds have already crept through his hole in the stable wall. They grow in all the wrong directions, sprouting up from between floorboards and sideways through the wall’s cracks. Dark clouds hover above the country. The birds are silent. It is raining.

 

Next he peers into Hux’s room. The door hangs slightly ajar, just enough to catch the corner of a yellow rug, its threads intertwined with ginger cat hair, and a vanity. On the vanity sits a bottle of expensive cologne and a large, circular mirror that reflects a blank wall. Each day Ren considers sneaking inside, and each day he stays rooted at its entrance, a strange nervousness pressing against his throat. Green tree shadows sway on the floor. They stretch too long, far too detailed for mere outlines. In these moments Ren wishes for Hux. Here, he would curl his lip and remind him that these trees are not hunching into themselves like old divorced men and that these shadows, no matter from which angle you watch them, are not your own.

 

Four hours until Hux returns.

 

Ren swears he can wait.

 

He creeps down the stairs. It’s raining harder now.

 

The living room, revisited. He examines the bookshelf. He traces his finger down the spines of Hux’s nonfiction epics, his medical bibles. His hip bumps against the lamp, nearly knocks the shade from its bulb. Ren watches himself in the mirror above the fireplace. The circles under his eyes have deepened. He pushes his hair back. In the gloom he looks almost frail.

 

Ren moves on to the kitchen. He rummages through the cupboards. Bread and brandy, saltines and canned soup. In the fridge he finds a plastic wrapped chicken breast and a carton of eggs. Ren’s stomach growls. He vows to make Hux a proper shopping list.

 

The rain drones heavy against the roof. It’s a blue day, accented with loud spurts of yellow lightning, sky veins bursting like fault lines. Ren peers through the window. The natural light softens his smile. In his wonder he misses details: Hux’s grandmother’s name embroidered in the guest room pillows, cat scratches dotting the couch’s side, rain leaking through the window sills. He misses the quiet scent of cigarettes and fresh laundry. He misses the way the darkness deepens at the edge of the wood, how it sometimes moves independent of the wind.

 

IV. Porch

 

“Today I cleaned the mailbox, the stable, the cabinets, _and_ the kitchen sink,” Ren says, counting each item off on his fingers. He leans back on the porch swing, smiles as the sun lays eyes on his face. Millicent lounges at his feet. “And I named all the farm animals for you. I thought you might like that.”

 

Hux wrinkles his nose. “Well, I don’t like it,” he says, sitting neatly on the front steps, face hidden behind a newspaper. “I think it’s weird.”

 

“You’re weird,” retorts Ren.

 

Hux purses his lips. He flips the page. He says nothing.

 

_Nice one, Ren_.

 

He watches the road. Dust swirls like breath from its beaten down dirt. Idly, accidental, another thought snakes its way through the white noise of his mind:

 

_Maybe I’m living in reverse._

 

_No_ , he quickly decides.

 

His kindness drowned with his father. Unsteady and sometimes cruel, he walks forward in circles.

 

_But yet_ \--

 

Today’s marigolds bloom the same as yesterday’s; and tomorrow will burn with today’s yellow moon. Tonight Hux will burn dinner, again, and again it will be too hot to sleep. The owls will howl at his window and he’ll roll over, sleeplessly, until his limbs tangle themselves in his bedsheets.

 

With a fugitive’s honesty he could confide in Hux, tell him that scissors remind him of his father and his father reminds him of roads that wind through dead spaces. In these places neglected by time, boys twine crowns out of cattails and hoard royal pennies in their tin cans. Ren could tell him how his father was the king of nowhere. How he would pull nickels from behind each kid’s ear, and with cigarettes on his breath tell them that he nabbed this one in Birmingham, and that one from Biloxi. Back in my day, he’d say, probably lying, this coulda bought you a whole head of cattle. Then he’d turn to Ben. Bet you feel real lucky, he’d say. He’d turn back to the kid. Isn’t he lucky? he’d ask. Yes sir, the kid would nod, grinning with two teeth.

 

_He sure looks lucky to me_.

 

Ren could tell Hux all these things. But his stomach has plummeted through his feet and his hands tremble with rage or fear or maybe both. Ren could tell Hux all these things, but instead he says, too calmly: “Everything’s all fucked up.”

 

“You’re fucked up,” Hux says without looking up from the paper. He loosens his tie. It’s a hot summer day, the kind that seeps into his bones.

           

Ren swallows. His hands wring together. The heat sways his vision. Mind racing eyes hunting for a fixed point on the horizon, he roots himself in this yellow present. He finds his foothold on the bleached porch and in the fierce red of Hux’s hair. “Yeah,” he says finally, mouth dry and large shoulders stooped.

 

He stands, barbed wire scores searing his thighs, and returns inside the house. He slams the door behind him.

 

V. Roof

 

A wet thud on the roof jolts Hux awake. It slides slick, like flesh.

 

Hux yanks on his robe.

 

He meets Ren in the hall. Ren’s eyes are wide; his hair still wears sleep’s muss. “Did you hear that?” he asks, voice hoarse.

 

The moon creeps into the hallway, whispers gold into Hux’s pale eyelashes. He could’ve been a king, in a better time. “Of course I heard it,” Hux snaps, straight-backed and shaky handed. “Of course.”

           

_Should we investigate_? ask Ren’s arms, crossed tight over his chest. He glances at the hall’s end. There the darkness hangs a heavy shapeless mass. Black and impenetrable, Ren wonders what would happen if he sank his hand into it, if with black gnashing teeth it would consume first his fingers, and then his white palm, licking its lips as it swallowed his love line whole.

 

Heart racing, Hux starts down the hall. He pretends he doesn’t feel Ren’s eyes hiding themselves in his back. “Are you coming?” he asks, hoping he sounds more annoyed than afraid. The hall shrinks his voice.

 

“You can hold onto me,” Ren says, half-joking. “If you’re scared.”

 

Hux snorts. “I hope you’re kidding.”

 

They continue down the hall. Their guarded distance tightens into fearful closeness as they plunge into the dark. Their shoulders brush at the top of the stairs. They can’t see each other’s faces. “Careful, Ren,” says Hux, whispering without knowing why. “Watch your step.”

 

“You weren’t planning on pushing me down?”

 

Hux squints into the dark. “It’s not like you have a policy to collect.”

 

Ren pales.

 

Pretending that they don’t feel a hard stare on their backs, they rush down the stairs. Hux marches through the living room to the front door. Ren trails behind him, inexpertly dodging the silhouettes of his furniture.

 

They emerge on the porch. Hux pulls his robe tighter. It’s colder than usual.

 

The morning’s raindrops dot the railing. Wet clouds drape themselves like fainting women over the woods. The moon buries itself in their rolling quiet. Only a thin sliver of light washes over the porch’s steps.

 

“There’ll be a ladder in the stable,” says Hux as they walk quickly, feigning confidence, around the house’s side.

 

“What do you think is up there?” asks Ren.

 

“A branch, maybe, or a bird.”

 

“Sounded a lot heavier than a bird,” drawls Ren. He crosses his arms over his chest, frowns into the heavy dark. Nothing is thicker than country darkness. In the absence of a soft cosmopolitan touch it gorges itself on forgotten wastelands, spreads its thick curls over rusted mills and overgrown fields.

 

Ren shivers. His shadow shivers with him.

 

They stumble into the stable. Their hips and elbows collide as they hurdle blind through the dark. Hux keeps one hand on the wall, feeling for the ladder’s peeling wood.

 

Hux finds it near the water trough. He stops abruptly; Ren crashes into his back, swears under his breath. He is acutely aware of the woods staring through the patched-up wall, of the animals’ black eyes boring into his back. Without thinking he reaches for Hux’s hand.

 

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” Hux says. The dark makes him earnest, almost kind.

 

Rensputters out a laugh. “I’m fine,” he says, yanking his hand back to his side. He’s glad Hux can’t see him blush. “I’m not usually this jumpy.”

 

Hux rolls his eyes. “I find that hard to believe.”

 

They pull the ladder from the wall. Together they drag it to the house’s side, where they prop it up and then stare upwards into the dark, each waiting for the other to volunteer. _Hux should do it_ , Ren thinks, tapping his foot on the damp gravel. _It’s his goddamn house_.

 

_Ren should do it_. Hux purses his lips. He wishes his heartbeat would slow down. _It’s my goddamn house_.

 

Cold wind whistles through the trees.

 

Hux speaks first. “You go.”

 

Ren swallows. The moon, shy and senseless, has hidden behind the clouds. They see only outlines of each other. Holding back shivers, Ren tries to think like Hux. Logically, as though he is conducting a dissection. _That wet smack on the roof was only a bird shot down by the storm, an odd but ultimately explainable anomaly in our day to day life._

_Don’t look so pathetic. The night will always be loud and unexplained._

_You’re wasting time, Ren._

“Come on, then,” says Hux. He stands like a general’s son, knees locked with hands clenched behind his back. “Climb up.”

 

Ren obeys.

 

As he climbs he becomes again overwhelmed with himself, with his own building terror. The hairs on his neck raise. Dread curdles his stomach.

 

As he climbs, he thinks of what he could find.

 

Perhaps his father’s ghost with a gash mouth scored across his bloated face and his limbs splayed over the shingles.

 

Perhaps he’ll find the children who discovered the body. They’ll be weeping like their wounds are fresh, like their wounds are their own and not the collateral damage of Kylo Ren, the black-eyed beast from the bayou, who made his mother weep on their front stoop until her eyes sank like ships into the floor. Worse still he could find, oh _god_ he could find--

 

“There’s nothing!” he cries, and his shadow slips into the night.

 

“Oh god, there’s nothing!”

**Author's Note:**

> thanks to the amazing author and artist [fathobbitlover](http://archiveofourown.org/users/FatHobbitLover/pseuds/FatHobbitLover) for pushing me to write this!!  
> i have a [twitter](https://twitter.com/lostballoons) and a [tumblr](http://lost-balloons.tumblr.com/)


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